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Prehistoric Settlements

Enclosed hut circle settlement near Conies Down Tor

Grid ref: SX 5918 7882

On walking routes: The Lichway

Main image: Cow's skull above the Cowsic - 43 metres from location - image by Derek Harper (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

This scheduled monument is a Bronze Age settlement of stone hut circles built on the sloping ground below Conies Down Tor. The site consists of several circular stone foundations, the remains of domestic structures that once housed families on Dartmoor during the prehistoric period. The huts were built from the natural stone scattered across the moor, their walls partly sunk into the hillside for shelter against the exposed moorland weather.

Today the site is marked by low stone rings and disturbed ground, best read by walking among them and imagining the activity that once filled this hollow. It sits within the broader pattern of Bronze Age settlement that characterizes this part of Dartmoor, where scattered communities built small farming hamlets across the high ground. The landscape here remains largely unchanged, making it one of the clearest windows into ancient moorland life.

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Hound TorHound Tor. Photograph by Glavind Strachan Photography

“Jan Pook druv a party To Princetown one day, Returning wherefrom, On his empty post shay, To the " Saracen's Head," He pulled up for a wet, Refreshment 'es zel And his osses to get. Jan drinked wey some miners Until, as he zed, The liquor he drinked Had got into his head. When he started again, To ...”

Also on Our DartmoorRing cairn and cist, Soussons Down — A ring cairn 8.6 m across of at least 22 edge-set stones up to 0.85 m high, with a cist in which two coils of human hair were found in 1903, on Soussons Down.

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Photograph by Glavind Strachan Photography

Which Dartmoor place is this?

Irishmans Wall. A historic wall built by Irish men around 1820, stretching from Cullever Steps across Belstone Tor.

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